IGLOO An igloo or snowhouse is a type of shelter built of snow, originally built by t he Inuit.

Although igloos are usually associated with all Inuit, they were predominantly c onstructed by people of Canada's Central Arctic and Greenland's Thule area. Othe r Inuit people tended to use snow to insulate their houses, which were construct ed from whalebone and hides. Snow is used because the air pockets trapped in it make it an insulator. On the outside, temperatures may be as low as -45 C (-49 F), but on the inside the temperature may range from -7 C (19 F) to 16 C (61 F) when wa rmed by body heat alone.[2]

Community of igloos (Illustration from Charles Francis Hall's Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux, 1865) Building an igloo in Cape Dorset

STILT HOUSE Stilt houses or pile dwellings or palafitte are houses raised on piles over the surface of the soil or a body of water. Stilt houses are built primarily as a pr otection against flooding,[1] but also serve to keep out vermin.[2] The shady sp ace under the house can be used for work or storage.[3 In the Neolithic and Bronze Age, sti lt-houses settlements were common in the Alpine and Pianura Padana (Terramare) r egion.[4] Remains have been found at the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia and at th e Mondsee and Attersee lakes in Upper Austria, for example. Early archaeologists like Ferdinand Keller thought they formed artificial islands, much like the Sco ttish Crannogs, but today it is clear that the majority of settlements were loca ted on the shores of lakes and were only inundated later on.[5] Reconstructed st ilt houses are shown in open air museums in Unteruhldingen and Zrich (Pfahlbaulan d). In June 2011, the prehistoric pile dwellings in six Alpine states were desig nated as the UNESCO World Heritage Site. A single Scandinavian pile dwelling, th e Alvastra stilt houses, has been excavated in Sweden.[citation needed] According to archeological evidences stilt-houses settlements were an architectu ral norm in the Caroline Islands and Micronesia and are still present in Oceania today.[6] Today, stilt houses are still common in parts of the Mosquito Coast i n northeastern Nicaragua, northern Brazil, South East Asia, Papua New Guinea and West Africa.[7] In the Alps, similar buildings, known as raccards, are still in use as granaries. In England, granaries are placed on staddlestones, similar to stilts, to prevent mice and rats getting to the grain. Stilted graneries are al so a common feature in West Africa, e.g., in the Malinke language regions of Mal i and Guin

BOAT HOUSE For the "Boat House" at the United States Naval Academy, see Hubbard Hall (Annap olis, Maryland). Camp Topridge boathouse, Adirondacks, USA A boathouse (or boat house) is a building especially designed for the storage of boats, normally smaller craft for sports or leisure use.[1] These are typically

located on open water, such as on a river. Often the boats stored are rowing bo ats. Other boats such as punts or small motor boats may also be stored. Sometimes, a boathouse may be the headquarters of a boat club or rowing club. It may also include a restaurant, bar,[2] and other leisure facilities,[1] perhaps for members of an associated club. Boathouses are also sometimes modified to in clude living quarters for people, or the whole structure may be used as temporar y or permanent housing. In Scandinavia, the boathouse is known as a naust, a word deriving from Old Nors e naversta. These were typically built with stone walls and timber roofs and woul d be either open to the sea or provided with sturdy doors. The floors would be a simple continuation of the beach sand or rock, or they might be dug down to per mit a boat to sail into the boathouse.